>After six months, I attended the international Esperanto conference in Seoul, Korea, and spoke only Esperanto for a few days. I was glad I was doing it, and somewhat glad I did it, but in hindsight maybe should have used that time to learn Mandarin or another language where I can communicate with people that don't speak English.
Esperanto is a language where you can communicate with people that don't speak English ;)
If you weren't already bilingual - the best part about Esperanto is it teaches you how to learn a second language by doing it. It also gets out of your way since, for Romantic-based languages, the grammar and vocabulary mostly stays out of your way and you can focus more on "actually learning" than on building vocab or remembering weird edge cases in the grammar. Your time spent learning Esperanto may have actually created a solid foundation to learning Mandarin, if that's what you desire to learn!
There are studies that learning Esperanto can aid in learning other languages [0], although many of them are quite dated. It seems many of the studies agree that unless you're already particularly adept at learning a new language - learning Esperanto will aid you in learning other languages.
Esperanto is a language where you can communicate with people that don't speak English ;)
If you weren't already bilingual - the best part about Esperanto is it teaches you how to learn a second language by doing it. It also gets out of your way since, for Romantic-based languages, the grammar and vocabulary mostly stays out of your way and you can focus more on "actually learning" than on building vocab or remembering weird edge cases in the grammar. Your time spent learning Esperanto may have actually created a solid foundation to learning Mandarin, if that's what you desire to learn!
There are studies that learning Esperanto can aid in learning other languages [0], although many of them are quite dated. It seems many of the studies agree that unless you're already particularly adept at learning a new language - learning Esperanto will aid you in learning other languages.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...